Tag Archives: teachers

I have to vent this out. There are a couple of band teachers in my area who I think need to be fired or at the very least severely reprimanded. These teachers have tenure in California, which makes it pretty much impossible to get rid of them. One of the teachers openly flaunts that they are tenured and pretty much has a carte blanche to do whatever he wants.

These teachers openly swear in class, and basically verbally assault kids. One of the teachers last week had a meltdown (again) in class and called the class “F***ing Idiots”. A friend of mine has a private school teaching job, and if he did ANYTHING like that he would be terminated immediately.

My concern is, besides the total lack of professionalism, what good does this do? In this age of instant gratification, where we think American Idol constitutes real singing, where we have iPad applications like Garageband which makes anyone pretty feel they are a musician, we should be ENCOURAGING students to play and enjoy music. Not having the students DROP music because of fear of Mr. X having a meltdown or because they intimidated them to play. This certainly was NOT the environment I was exposed to when I was in school, and if it was I seriously doubt I would have stopped playing in High School.

Comments? I think a lot of the problem is that these guys, and teachers in general, are tenured and they pretty much cannot be touched. Given the state of California’s budget and such, I kind of wish the district didn’t have funds to pay these guys.

“Computer technology is increasingly being used for teaching music in schools world-wide,” comments Mark Porter, Steinberg’s International Sales Manager. “But often the task of providing classroom resources is left to the individual teacher, even if their personal experience using modern music technology products has been somewhat limited. So the huge quantity of structured, high-quality resources provided by the Steinberg Classroom Resource Pack will be invaluable to music teachers everywhere, whether they are experienced Cubase users or are completely new to using computers – because it gives them more time for applying their teaching rather than preparing for it,” he continues.

Blah, blah, blah. Look, kids don’t want stupid worksheets to do. They want to play. The want to learn music, not do some generated worksheet. Technology. CMEA just discovered Band in a Box. Maybe in 10 years they will discover this? Maybe? Perhaps?UPDATE: 02/16/08 by E: The latest issue of Time Magazine has an article about “How To Make Better Teachers”. Funny thing is that technology is not mentioned in the article. Hmmm….